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Impersonator to Go on Trial for Kidnapping

BOSTON — He told stories of growing up on Manhattan’s Sutton Place, of getting into Yale at 14 and of his work as an astrophysicist, venture capitalist or movie producer, depending on his whim.

And Boston listened.

To his wife and everyone else here, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was known as Clark Rockefeller — presumably a member of one of the nation’s richest and most storied families.

But that persona disintegrated on a Back Bay street last summer when, on his first custody visit with his daughter after a bitter divorce, Mr. Gerhartsreiter pushed aside a social worker who was supervising, jumped into a waiting car with the 7-year-old girl and fled. That led to an international manhunt and, prosecutors say, the unveiling of a life’s worth of spectacular lies.

This most erudite of cities, where Mr. Gerhartsreiter had made his home since 2006, will be watching closely when he goes on trial here this week, seeking an explanation of how he could have fooled his former wife, a graduate of Harvard Business School, and so many others for so long.

Six days after his disappearance, investigators arrested Mr. Gerhartsreiter in Baltimore, where he told them he had hoped to start a new life with his daughter, Reigh. According to court documents, he had presented himself to real estate agents in Baltimore as Chip Smith, a ship’s captain who was moving with his daughter, Muffy.

Soon after the arrest, investigators matched a fingerprint he had left on a wine glass to one from an old immigration document; they said he was a German citizen who had come to the United States as an exchange student in the 1970s, and never left.

Mr. Gerhartsreiter was charged with custodial kidnapping, assault and battery (on the social worker), assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon (the S.U.V. that he fled in, which the social worker had hung on to as it sped off), and giving a false name to the police. The kidnapping charge, the most serious, carries a maximum sentence of five years.

The notoriety of the case riveted Boston, which could prove problematic when jury selection begins on Tuesday in Suffolk County Superior Court. Referring to “a toxic dose of sensational pretrial publicity,” the defense asked Judge Frank M. Gaziano last month to move the trial to western Massachusetts.

Mr. Gerhartsreiter’s lawyers cited the “particularly damaging” effect of the news, reported soon after his arrest, that he was a “person of interest” in the 1985 disappearance and presumed murder of a couple whose guest house he had rented in San Marino, Calif., under a separate alias, Christopher Chichester. Jurors will not hear about that case, but the defense still doubts that an impartial jury can be assembled.

A poll of 300 Suffolk County residents, commissioned by the defense, found that 77 percent knew about the kidnapping case, according to court documents. Of those, the poll found, half believed that Mr. Gerhartsreiter was guilty.

Photo

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, center, a German national who identifies himself as Clark Rockefeller, appeared in a Boston court in April. Credit
Pool Photo by Mark Garfinkel

But Judge Gaziano refused to move the trial, writing, “The fact that a juror has been exposed to pretrial publicity does not mean that the juror is no longer impartial.”

The judge also said the defense was partly to blame for its predicament, writing that Mr. Gerhartsreiter’s “calculated efforts to court media attention diminish the argument” for moving the trial.

He was referring chiefly to jailhouse interviews that Mr. Gerhartsreiter gave to The Boston Globe and the “Today” show on NBC after his arrest. Among other things, Mr. Gerhartsreiter spoke of taking a childhood trip to Mount Rushmore in a Ford station wagon, teaching his daughter to read poetry when she was 2 years old and writing a novel on the founding of Israel.

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The defense will tell jurors that Mr. Gerhartsreiter was legally insane when he took his daughter to Baltimore and when he spoke to investigators and reporters after his arrest. His lawyers are likely to try to paint him as a fragile, mentally ill man who was pushed over the brink when he lost his beloved daughter, nicknamed Snooks, in the divorce.

An evaluation by an expert defense witness found “indications of grandiose delusions, illogical thinking and misperceptions of reality,” court documents show.

In one victory for the defense, Judge Gaziano has agreed to suppress all but the first few minutes of the statement Mr. Gerhartsreiter gave to state and federal officials after his arrest, on the ground that they continued questioning him after he invoked his right to remain silent.

But an insanity defense can be tricky, not least when the type of juror typically coveted by the defense in such cases — the intelligent type — is also the most likely to have read news reports on the case.

Mr. Gerhartsreiter’s former wife, Sandra Boss, now lives with Reigh in London but is on a list of scheduled witnesses. Mr. Gerhartsreiter told her during their 13-year marriage that he had never used a driver’s license or a Social Security card, according to court filings — apparently to explain his lack of identification — and even persuaded her to file tax returns as a single person.

In her only public statement since Mr. Gerhartsreiter’s arrest, Ms. Boss begged her former husband on a widely circulated video to return Reigh, saying, “Please, please bring Snooks back.”

Prosecutors want to show the video at trial; the defense has asked that it be suppressed. Prosecutors have also asked the judge not to allow discussion of “extraneous” details of the couple’s divorce, the rancor of which Mr. Gerhartsreiter referred to in his statement to the police.

He told them that he lost custody of Reigh “four days before Christmas, which was evil,” according to court filings.

“I just want to be a father,” he said. “That’s all I want to be.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Man Who Called Himself a Rockefeller Is Set for Trial in Daughter’s Kidnapping. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe